As of March 2015 the download you want for a standard windows machine is Windows x86-64 MSI installer (The other download is for servers). Its circled here:

Run the installer!
You’ll come across this page in the installer:

You’ll want to scroll down and add it to the path. If you don’t that’s okay. You can add it later.
Adding Python to the PATH will allow you to call if from the command line.

After the installation is complete double check to make sure you see python in your PATH. You can find your path by opening your control panel -> System and Security -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> Environment Variables -> Selecting Path -> Edit ->

Now you’re looking at your Path. Be Careful, if you delete or add to the path accidently you may break other programs.

You need to confirm that C:\Python27; and C:\Python27\Scripts; is part of your path.

If you do not see it in your path you can simply add it at the beginning or end of the variable value box. As you can see in the image below.

Install Pip:

As of Python Version 2.7.9 Pip is installed automatically and will be available in your Scripts folder.

If you install a later version of Python I would recommend installing it according to this helpful stackoverflow post.

Pip is a Package manager for python which we will use to load in modules/libraries into our environments.

An example of one of these libraries is VirtualEnv which will help us keep our environments clean from other Libraries. This sounds really confusing but as you start using it you’ll begin to understand how valuable this encapsulation of modules/libraries can be.

To test that Pip is installed open a command prompt (win+r->’cmd’->Enter) and try ‘pip help’

You should see a list of available commands including install, which we’ll use for the next part:

Install virtualenv:

Now that you have pip installed and a command prompt open installing virtualenv to our root Python installation is as easy as typing ‘pip install virtualenv’
Like so:

Now we have virtualenv installed which will make it possible to create individual environments to test our code in. But managing all these environments can become cumbersome. So we’ll pip install another helpful package…

Install virtualenvwrapper-win:

This is the kit and caboodle of this guide.

Just as before we’ll use pip to install virtualenvwrapper-win. ‘pip install virtualenvwrapper-win’
Like so:

Excellent! Now we have everything we need to start building software using python! Now I’ll show you how buttery smooth it is to use these awesome tools!

Lets call it HelloWold. All we do in a command prompt is enter ‘mkvirtualenv HelloWold’
This will create a folder with python.exe, pip, and setuptools all ready to go in its own little environment. It will also activate the Virtual Environment which is indicated with the (HelloWold) on the left side of the prompt.

Anything we install now will be specific to this project. And available to the projects we connect to this environment.

Connect our project with our Environment:

Now we want our code to use this environment to install packages and run/test code.

First lets create a directory with the same name as our virtual environment in our preferred development folder. In this case mine is ‘dev’

Now to bind our virtualenv with our current working directory we simply enter ‘setprojectdir .’
Like so:

Now next time we activate this environment we will automatically move into this directory!
Buttery smooth.

Deactivate:

Let say you’re content with the work you’ve contributed to this project and you want to move onto something else in the command line. Simply type ‘deactivate’ to deactivate your environment.
Like so:

Notice how the parenthesis disappear.
You don’t have to deactivate your environment. Closing your command prompt will deactivate it for you. As long as the parenthesis are not there you will not be affecting your environment. But you will be able to impact your root python installation.

Workon:

Now you’ve got some work to do. Open up the command prompt and type ‘workon HelloWold’ to activate the environment and move into your root project folder.

Like so:

Pretty sweet! Lets get working.

Pip Install:

To use flask we need to install the packages and to do that we can use pip to install it into our HelloWold virtual environment.

Make sure (HelloWold) is to the left of your prompt and enter ‘pip install flask’
Like so:

This will bring in all the tools required to write your first web server!

Flask:

Now that you have flask installed in your virtual environment you can start coding!

Open up your favorite text editor and create a new file called hello.py and save it in your HelloWold directory.

I’ve simply taken the sample code from Flask’s website to create a very basic ‘Hello World!’ server.

I’ve named the file hello.py.

Once the code is in place I can start the server using ‘python hello.py’ this will run the python instance from your virtual environment that has flask.

68 thoughts on “Python, Pip, virtualenv installation on Windows”

Thanks. Works like a charm! This is one of the reasons why I kept switching to Linux as it was seamless there but, windows most often poses problems while installing. Now, I think I can configure a final dev environment in windows for python development.

You can install both Python 2.7 and Python 3.5 on your machine then when building your virtual environment specify which python version you want to use. See this blog post for how to do it. See this blog post for how to do it

Hello, I’m trying to follow this guide, but when I execute this(I’m using PowerShell on win7):
pip install virtualenv-win
It gave me this error:
Could not find a version that satisfies the requiment virtualenv-win (from versions: )
No matching distribution found for virtualenv-win

Thank you for your excellent article.
But I am having a real problem with Windows 10 and file permissions.
The persistent error I am getting is:
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: ‘c:\\program files\\python36-32\\Lib\\site-packages\\virtualenv.py’
and I cannot see any way around this, can you assist me?
My first foray into creating a virtual environment has not been without its challenges.

I have the same error when trying to open a python file in IDLE. Windows 10, Python 3.6 (I also have 2.7 installed and recently removed 3.2 to make some space on my computer) I am very new to this and have had no luck finding a solution online. It says:
[Errno 13] Permission Denied: C:\\Users\\ cb\\.idlerc\\recent-files.lst

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Awesome article that really helped me a lot in setting up the env.
adding to it – just in case we want to choose a different directory other than C drive ,we can do so while
Make a Virtual Environemt:
we need to browse to that particular directory
ex : D:
mkdir pyhtonf
and than we can run the mkvirtualenv HelloWold

Thanks so much for this tutorial. My goal is to develop a very basic (HTML only) webpage, place it on a Raspberry PI3, on my LAN then access this remotely whereby data will be entered via text field on the webpage and stored in an Sqlite3 database (again on the RP3).

I’ve come to adore Conda on Windows, but still have to deal with a lot of issues installing packages not found on Conda. This walkthrough for creating virtualenvs in vanilla Python was perfect and easy to follow. Much appreciated!!!

I had the same problem on Windows using gitBash from the HelloWorld director. However, when I ran the pip virtualenv install into my path through command prompt as admin it worked. Then I setup my git repo in my HelloWorld dir. I hope this may help others who had the same challenge.

Once I open browser per the link provided above, http://127.0.0.1:5000/ , what should I expect to see? I only see the followng page error:

The connection was reset

The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer’s network connection.
If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

If I go into browser and enter http://127.0.0.1:5000/ I get the same result. If I open the file from browser, I merely see the saved in the hello.py file. I assume this means I am not ready to see the result of the code. Can someone please assist?

I follow all instruction from the beginning to the end, all steps are successful until the end when entering the last command, python hello.py nothing as output appeared from my terminal…
Even when entering the local host URL error message appeared as: This site can’t be reached 127.0.0.1 refused to connect.